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Comment by jarrell_mark | Hacker News Reader

A bit unrelated but did you all know that PlayStation's and Switch's OSs are both based on FreeBSD to varying extents?

I can't speak to the PlayStation, but this claim doesn't really hold for the Switch. The Switch's OS "Horizon" borrows BSD's networking stack, but then again: which OS doesn't? [0] Nintendo has written their own kernel, which is fully reverse engineered and re-implemented at this point. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch_system_softwar...

[1] https://github.com/Atmosphere-NX/Atmosphere/tree/master/libr...

The Switch's OS is not based on FreeBSD at all. The Switch's OS is a continued development of the operating system of the Nintendo 2DS/3DS which was likely a custom OS.

Some news sites read the Switch's open source credits crediting the FreeBSD project and ran with the headline "Switch OS based on FreeBSD". By the same measure, people should call Windows "based on FreeBSD" because the kernel uses BSD code or used to at least. It's sub par reporting that turned into an urban legend.

The PS3, PS4 and PS5 operating systems are systems based on the FreeBSD kernel, which is probably why it's tempting to think the Switch would be too.

AIUI Even your Windows claim is wrong on the specifics. Microsoft copy-pasted BSD code for a whole bunch of userspace tools, so you'll find some (but not all) of what you'd expect there, but the kernel socket implementation is their own.

If you go back far enough (prior to NT in particular) the OS doesn't provide sockets, or indeed TCP/IP, and it's true that (some?) popular third party vendors just used BSD code, possibly after filing off the serial numbers, but that's not the Windows kernel.

Also, sockets just aren't that clever. I mean, the idea is pretty clever, but once somebody tells you the idea, it's not exactly rocket surgery to implement.

> it's not exactly rocket surgery to implement.

A secure implementation of sockets in a multiuser-system is not what i would call "trivial"...but yeah the base idea is just a "fifo-file"

That does make sense if you're a large corporation. You might not want to develop an OS from scratch, but Windows and WXWorks requires a license. You could go Linux, but what about the GPL? You might be okay, but why risk it. That leaves you with the choice of any of the BSDs.

Sony already uses Linux in some of their TVs.

https://oss.sony.net/Products/Linux/TV/KD-43XE7000_v8902.htm...

Yeah, one of my jobs right now involves having to implement some stuff for the playstation 4/5. You should see the dev and test kits for the ps4 and ps5... they look something like weird desktop computers from 2011 or something more than the actual deal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV6kCVXssZ4

Seeing if something will work on the playstation is like, is there a port in freebsd of this software and how do we get it to run on this thing. You don't get the ports collection unfortunately but thankfully ports are kind of just like a patch diff that you can apply yourself.

yes. and I imagine those choices were more likely due to the permissive license than for any particular technical reason.

I don't think it was just license : https://klarasystems.com/articles/deep-diving-into-the-stren...

Otherwise they could have taken NetBSD, OpenBSD or other BSD

Lots of older Dell switches run NetBSD as NOS. Newer ones use Linux.

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